Don't give up. The battle is worth the results.

[Phil <ph...@tcp.net.au>]

> Yes.  If you want commecial support for Cocoon, get commecial support 
> for cocoon.

In Australia, Spark Digital are providing commercial support for Cocoon 
and re-writing all the documentation to fit in with a MaxOSX IDE they're 
developing which makes use of cocoon as well as several other open 
source projects.

There are also a series of conferences from July 11 through 18 all over 
Sydney that will be presenting XML and XSLT using cocoon, and informal 
workshops for problem solving. Better yet they're free! ...in keeping 
with open source :) There are enough big name sponsors showing up to 
give it a MacWorld feel.

I'm hoping that enough aussie cocoon users will come along so we can 
help to support cocoon and xml developments here in oz.

I'll dig up the brochure and post times and dates if anyone is 
interested.

I've just finished working on the Val Morgan web site which is now a 
live cocoon 2 project:

	http://www.valmorgan.com.au/

It makes use of almost every component within cocoon and will soon be 
internationalised. (ie native language and local information versions 
for each country.

Anyone who has got to this stage with an open source project knows that 
the documentation is really bad.  Not just cocoon's documentation, but 
$100 books written by profiteers that contain little, if any, 
information.

This is normal for this stage of a development - commercial or open 
source. I've spent thousands on commercial software with useless 
documentation.

It's very hard to pioneer emerging technology and more often than not 
the big, slow, crappy, bastard of a class library just wont come to the 
party. However, in my case the problem has always been user stupidity - 
without exception.

I like to think it's the stupidity of the "would-be" technical writers 
that put together the documentation I don't understand however, when I 
finally do understand what I'm doing, I re-read the crappy documentation 
and find that is does kinda mean what it says. It just does it really 
poorly. Developers are not often good technical writers because they 
assume far too much. Good copywriters are not often good technical 
writers.

A good technical writer, these days is hard to find. :)

But don't give up. The increased speed of web application construction, 
the ease of extending and maintaining web applications that take 
advantage of cocoon, and the happy customers that result, far outweigh 
the hair-pulling, aging, machine destroying experience of learning 
cocoon.

Thanks,

Phil

PS Doesn't big, slow, and crappy simply refer to anything running in 
Java? We really need a Smalltalk cocoon for serious players. Anyone up 
for it?


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Re: Don't give up. The battle is worth the results.

[Diana Shannon <sh...@apache.org>]

On Thursday, June 27, 2002, at 08:15  PM, Phil wrote:

> In Australia, Spark Digital are providing commercial support for Cocoon 
> and re-writing all the documentation to fit in with a MaxOSX IDE 
> they're developing which makes use of cocoon as well as several other 
> open source projects.

Hi,

I noticed your above post on cocoon-users. Can you elaborate a bit on 
what you meant by "re-writing" all Cocoon documentation? Are you 
starting from scratch or extending what is already there? If so, how 
will it be available to users down the road? Only as a part of your 
product? Free?

Thanks.

Diana
(also a Mac OSX fan)


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